Telcon: 2023 05 24

Wednesday May 24th, 9am PT (UTC -7:00)

Attendees

• Peter Scheibel (host)
• Chris Green
• David Gomez
• Davide DelVento
• Jakov Petrina
• Jakov Smolic
• Mark Krentel
• Tammy Dahlgren

Agenda

This meeting is just Q&A: there are no pre-planned general Spack topics

• Chris Green is reporting the concretizer changing defaults is very problematic for them
  • e.g. on root
  • while the concretizer has the leeway to choose non-default options, it should be setting defaults where possible
  • the environment uses unify:when_possible, but can use unify:true
    • (reconcretize with concretize -f)
  • can this be bisected?
    • Root is setting some non-default variant
    • spack-python could be used to help the bisection test: spack-python -c "import spack.spec; x = spack.spec.Spec('zlib').concretized(); print(x.tree())"
  • Peter: I don't think sticky variants would help with this https://spack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/packaging_guide.html#sticky-variants
• David: using Spack in an isolated environment
  • Question: when Spack is building in a directory, it changes some of the permissions
  • Turns out these permissions were what the user already had when creating files
  • But the system doesn't allow changing permissions, and so failed (even though the new permissions matched the old ones)
  • It would be good if we didn't change permissions if we didn't have to
  • Chris: some packages try to change permissions
  • See spack config blame packages
    • There does not appear to be any config here to disable permissions setting (e.g. removing the permissions section or setting the permissions to what is already being generated).
• Davide: on upgrading to v0.20
  • Starting with spack v0.18 environment, lmod modules generated with Spack
  • Users may be using spack load vs. module load to load these packages
  • They may have config in ~/.spack files
    • You can avoid using ~ with
      • (not as useful in this context) export SPACK_USER_CACHE_PATH=`pwd`/misc-cache
      • export SPACK_DISABLE_LOCAL_CONFIG=true
  • What is in ~/.spack?
    • User config
    • caches: can be cleared with spack clean -m
• Chris: ping on https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/37781